The spillage of oil at sea is a matter of great concern to environmentalists, fishermen, oil producers and others for whom the containment of spilled oil requires quick and efficient action to abate oil pollution.
In the open sea, oil tends to float on the surface of calm water but wave action causes this floating oil to mix with sand and rocks on the beach. Once mixed, the oil may remain or may be taken out to sea where it slowly sinks to the bottom of the seafloor.
For the removal of oil floating on the surface of the water, mechanical devices such as skimmers have been used. However, as the name implies, these devices function best on calm seas where their skimming process can be best effected and the oil removed from the sea is thick and viscous tending to clump so that there is little oil-water mixing.
In addition, when skimmers are extended over wide areas of the spill-area, they tend to trap whatever else floats on the water, in addition to the oil, including debris. In arctic areas, ice may also be drawn into the skimmed area interfering with the clean-up process.
Absorbing devices have been used heretofore with some success but they function by having their surfaces first absorbing or trapping the oil on their surface followed by a cleaning process.
It has been found that these devices are relatively inefficient in cleaning oil already mixed with sand, rocks and beaches and made more viscous where ambient temperatures are low, such as in the Arctic and North Sea.
While a number of devices are known and are used to remove oil from a beach or shoreline such use is sometimes impractical or inefficient. For example, soft, sandy beaches may not support heavy-land borne equipment such as bulldozers. Rocky beaches and those where indentations in the shoreline do not lend itself to sweeping beach-cleaning action present additional problems. Beyond that high pressure hoses whereby detergents are used to blast over rocky surfaces may disrupt the ecological environment by dislodging life forms on the rock surface and subsurface in addition to dislodging but not removing the oil. While not all oil removal can be effected on the beach areas, when floating craft using oil-water separating booms and conduits have been used, they have been relatively ineffective in rough seas when waves and breakers disturb the through-flow into the booms. As described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,061,569. Even certain improvements, such as the oceal intake system described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,673,497, suffers from oil-spill clean up from beaches and shoreline.
The need to visually and carefully locate the areas on beach surfaces where oil is washed-up and is contaminating the area is vital for efficiency and for maintaining and restoring the environmental integrity.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus to facilitate the clean-up of oil spills from shorelines, beaches and rocky areas which are not oleophilic.
It is another object of this invention to provide hand-held vacuum devices easily directed to oil pools, and oil covered areas on beaches, shorelines and the like so that the oil can be effectively removed.
It is still another object of this invention to provide a multi-vessel scheme comprising a shoreward first oil up-take and transfer vessel, connected to a second seaward vessel to hold and then transfer the collected oil to a third or more vessel for disposing of the collected oil spilled.